1984 and V for Vendetta Comparing and Contrasting Essay

George Orwell’s 1984 and the movie V for Vendetta both have similar views on how society is being run. Since The book 1984 was written before V for Vendetta, so perhaps V for Vendetta may have based some of its ideas on this book. Both 1984 and V for Vendetta have similarities like the way the themes and how the male protagonists are the one in charge of overturning the government. The first similarity between 1984 and V for Vendetta is that the society is being run by totalitarian rule. It is the government that controls the lives of the people and how the society should be run. In 1984, ‘Big Brother’ aka the Inner party, is the figure that keeps an eye on the people and uses telescreens to watch their movement while in V for Vendetta; ‘Leader’ aka Adam Susan, is in charge of England, its people and the Norsefire party. Another thing is that both factions have secret police. The jobs of the secret police in 1984 and V for Vendetta are basically the same as they spy for the government and try to capture people who are against the government. The people are being controlled by the leaders of their country to make sure they behave themselves and not try to rebel. The contrast between 1984 and V for Vendetta for the totalitarian rule are a bit different. In 1984, the government, more specifically the inner party, watches every move of the people and check carefully what they do while in V for Vendetta the government, more specifically the Norsefire Party, is a bit more lenient as they don’t set up cameras on the houses of every people but still set up cameras on public properties. The secret police are quite different in 1984 and V for Vendetta as in 1984, the secret police are deeply loyal to the inner party and don’t express their behaviours like in sexual desires unlike the secret police in V for Vendetta as in page 11, the secret police tried to attempt rape on Evey. Also in V for Vendetta, there are also normal police forces unlike in 1984. Freedom of speech, freedom of your owns thoughts and actions, the right to happiness. In our society today, we have all these rights, but imagine if we id not. 1984, written by George Orwell, and V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, both paint accurately scary descriptions about the government in the future and the dystopian society. 1984, written in 1949, was intended to be a portrayal of the future and V for Vendetta, made in 2005, shows Britain in power in 2038. Both of these pieces of literature were not far off from their description. As every single year passes by, our own society starts to reflect images from these books. When the government has this much power over the people, the people rebel, but can they be a success or not? 1984, written by George Orwell, illustrates a perfect example of a dystopian government. The setting is in Oceania, Britain. The government is full of spies and secret police that carefully watch the common people for any mistake they might make that can harm the government in any way. As shown with Winston Smith, the protagonist of the novel and many other citizens in Oceania, the government manipulates these characters into their pawns. The government asserts their power over the people in many ways. They have large telescreens in the people’s houses. The telescreens show the government what people are doing at all times. It can be dimmed down, but can never be turned off. Although Oceania is well off in money, the government rations food. The government’s philosophy is that if the people are given too much to eat, then they will learn to think for themselves and will see all the atrocities that the government commits and rebel. All the records of the past have been omitted and destroyed and created all over again to fit the government’s beliefs and to show that the government is always right. Big Brother has its own secret police, the Thought Police the themes were similar but there were many differences as well. for example, the resistance in 1984 was subtle if it existed at all while the resistance in v for vendetta was violent and actively opposing the government through force.

Cause and Effects of Stress in Children Essay

Stress is a response to a factor or situation that negatively affects the physical, emotional, or psychological existence of a person. Stress is good in small quantities as it motivates a person making him/her more productive. However, too much stress is detrimental to a person. Stress can interfere with the general life of a person. Most people assume that stress only affects adults. However, statistics indicate that stress also affects children. Children face intense pressure from their environment. Continuous stress in children is harmful to their activities, health, and development. There are a number of causes and effects of toxic stress in children. Stress can be caused by both negative and positive situations. Children living in abusive environments, both physical and emotional, experience stress. Arnold wrote that children who are bullied are in continuous state of depression. They, therefore, alienate themselves from their colleagues. Parents who constantly beat their children are also causes of stress. The fear that is manifested in children disorients them. They will not be able to talk about what they feel to anybody but rather keep to themselves. Events such as accidents, loss of loved ones, and rejection are also causes of stress in children. Social change patterns in children cause many stressful situations. Children at puberty yearn for freedom. This creates tension between them and the parents, who are constantly monitoring and regulating their activities. In the same stage, children will constantly be in need of money. Lack of money causes stress in children as they are not always able to buy whatever they may need. They will compare themselves with other children who are in comfortable financial positions. Such children are always anxious and worried of where and how they will get money. Stress in children is not only caused by what happens in their own lives but also by what happens in their parents’ lives. The greatest effects of stress are experienced by the brain. The brain controls all the stress mechanism in the body making it the primary stress organ. Johnson stated that the vulnerability of children’s brain is caused  by the fact that they are constantly growing and developing. Constant stress in children disrupts brain development and compromises its normal function. Research has indicated that children experiencing stress have smaller brains. Toxic stress impairs the connection of brain circuits resulting in development of a smaller brain. Prolonged period of stress in children affects their nervous and immune system. Stress hormones are released when a child is exposed to stress. Cortisol hormones, which are released as a result of stress, suppress the body immune system. This leaves a person vulnerable to diseases and infections. Depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and chronic diseases are also linked to childhood stress. Psychological effects of stress include changes in personality, aggressiveness, and irritability. Children under stress are likely to experience frustrations and isolation from friends and family. They spend more time on their own and lack motivation. Children may also have difficulty in concentration thereby affecting their academic performance. Children under extreme stress exhibit change in behavior. They may be more disobedient, fight often, stutter, and cry often. In conclusion, stress in children has many causes and effects. The notion that stress only affects adults is wrong. Too much stress, often referred to as toxic stress, is detrimental to the life of a child. Toxic stress affects the physical, emotional, psychological, and social aspects of a child. Even though every child reacts differently under stress, it is clear that stress affects the neural system and the health of a child. Children under stress tend to develop negative characteristics like irritability and disobedience. Research has indicated that there are number of causes of childhood stress which are interrelated. Social change patterns, abusive environment, and stress in parents are just some of the cause of childhood stress.

How The Immigrants Get Success Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

How The Immigrants Get Success - Essay Example She fled from El Salvador and now she is going to study art at UC Davis. How could she experience such immense success? I think that immigrants reach their American dream because they carried out three essential tasks: finding some support, being confident, and having a firm determination. To succeed in America the first important key to success is finding some support. You may not know how valuable support can be. The truth is that an immigrant will not succeed without at least some kind of support. Let me show you how it works. First of all, there are many kinds of support, such as financial, practical, and emotional support. Support can come from family members, friends, or workmates. Most immigrants feel helpless when they first arrive in the U.S., but they are usually hopeful. In addition, building a new life in a strange and foreign country is not easy. The reality is that as the time goes by immigrants will begin to feel hopeless if they do not get the necessary support. Howev er, if you are supported then you will be strong and confident because you can overcome many difficulties and also have more time to do other things, such as building your American dream. One person who illustrates the importance of support is the young immigrant named Bich. She came from Vietnam and became a successful woman who was also very kind and knowledgeable. Through her memoir, it was revealed that her step-mother and real-father neither inculcated nor took care of her. She felt sad and even sometimes wanted to escape from the house. However, she found loving support from her grandmother Noi. Noi was a harbor of refuge for Bich, as she gave Bich food when Bich was hungry and provided privacy for Bich. Therefore, Noi made Bich’s childhood easier and much happier. This warmed Bich’s heart so that she had a higher expectation of the future. Bich has become an established writer, having published three books. It could be said that this is all due to her grandmothe r’s support. To sum up, support can act as oxygen for a new immigrant. If you already have support then you must be more confident than before. The next essential key I am going to talk about is confidence. You might find that every successful man is confident because he acts with confidence. Perhaps you are wondering how confidence can help you to be successful. Every morning you must face a mirror, and when you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you feel? If you are a confident person then you will think you look good today. This means you are happy when you are on your way to work because you believe in your abilities and trust that you can finish your work nicely. If you are confident then nobody is going to doubt your decisions or actions because they trust you due to your confident behavior. A 17-year old boy named Lester escaped from Cuba by windsurfing more than 80 miles. He planned to escape when he was a kid because he believed he had a very good skill and coul d do this thing perfectly by himself. Before he escaped, he made a detailed plan and practiced windsurfing a lot. He didn’t tell anybody before he left Cuba. He did everything by himself, and this is very confident behavior. He escaped alone yet successful, and Lester became famous after he arrived in America. Confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of your life because it generally leads to success, and this is something that immigrants are striving for. If you have support and confidence then

Political Geography Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Political Geography - Term Paper Example Landlocked states have historically existed after the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were created after empires had been defeated and their territories had to be carved. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991 led to the division of the country into a number of republics (Glassner, 2003). Several of these republics do not have access to coastal ports which forces to remain under the clout and influence of Russia. A number of Eastern European States do not have access to the seaports but this has been mitigated by their joining of the European Union. This allows them to have access to seaports and trade with some of the largest economies of the world. The independence of several African states led to many of them not having access to the seaports. Many of these countries have experienced political, economic, and social problems because they have been destabilized by their powerful neighbors. Landlocked states are categorized according to their geographical location. Asia has a number of countries which are landlocked. The number of landlocked states in Asia is few in number as compared with Europe and Africa. The Central Asian republics which obtained independence from the USSR in 1991 are dependent upon Russia for their exports and imports. Afghanistan does not have any sea outlet which forces it to depend upon Iran and Pakistan for trade (Glassner, 2003). Other countries include Nepal and Laos which are dependent upon their more powerful neighbors for trade and commerce. A number of Eastern European states which became independent after the revolutions of 1989 are encircled by terrain. Previously these nations were dependent upon the USSR for their exports and imports. The USSR used this as a leverage to dominate and influence its satellite states that did not have access to the coastal areas. Africa has the largest number of landlocked states in its various regions

Marketing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 15

Marketing - Essay Example In the food segment the Marks and Spencer’s company employs the following competitive moves so that it cab have an advantage over its rivals. First and foremost it changes its prices to suit the consumer’s purchasing power and this enables the company to have a temporary advantage over the other rivalry firms. Similarly the company makes further improvements in its food products differentiation and it also maintains good relationships with the suppliers. (Baryon 2006) In the industry this is a very strong force since the Marks and Spencer’s company’s food industry has strong brand images and this makes it very hard for the new entrants. The initial capital expenditures are very huge and the exiting companies are achieving their economies of scale by being global. Another threatening factor to the potential new entrants is the trade tariffs as well as the international regulations whereby they have to prove themselves to the foreign companies, customers and also suppliers. In the food industry the substitute food products belong to the other firms in the industry. The Marks and Spencer’s foods segment is highly affected by the price changes in the substitute food products. Since the more the substitute food products become available to the consumers then the demand of the food products from the Marks and Spencer’s company become more elastic. This further allows the consumers to have more alternatives in the market. However this is a moderate but weak force in the industry since the businesses and also individuals wish to use other cheaper food products. A close substitute food product in the industry further constraints the company’s ability to raise its prices. On the other hand there is a lot of price competition in the industry especially in the food substitutes. Most of the consumers in Marks and Spencer’s foods consider the suitability as well as the nutritive value

Animals should be used for scientific research Essay

Animals should be used for scientific research - Essay Example According to Botting and Morrison, even history proves the usefulness of animals in medical research as the scientist Louis Pasteur himself used chickens to study cholera, and rabbits and guinea pigs to study anthrax. Through his study using animals, he was able to develop not only an idea on the nature of the disease but also on immunization. Moreover, the development of vaccines and antibiotics that saved millions of lives made use of animals in laboratory testing, such as the use of rabbits and mice in the development of the Hemophilus influenza vaccine that saved hundreds of children annually from death or severe brain damage. Indeed, animal research has saved millions of lives. Secondly, animals are used for research in order to further improve animal production, and in the process to gain insights on human health. According to information from the Rutgers School, animals are being studied for the prevention of tumors in animals, for the prevention of cancers, blood clotting, he art disease and infection, for the successful development of clones, for the control of reproduction, and for the improvement of the well-being of many animals like horses. At the same time, animal research can help medical professionals gain insight on the nature of tumor formation in human cancers (â€Å"Research†). Therefore, without this procedure, there is no direction for research on human cancer. Without prior research using animals, preventive measures for humans would not be formulated and possible medical treatment would not be realized. However, many non-government groups oppose the use of animals for scientific research. The members of these groups usually fight for animal rights and for the prevention of cruelty to animals. However, governments like that of the United Kingdom assure the public that the use of animals for research is â€Å"carefully regulated† (â€Å"Research and testing using animals†). Moreover, according to the American Associatio n for Laboratory Animal Science, there is strict control of the use of animals in laboratory testing and research. This is based on laws like the Animal Welfare Act of the United States. These laws help monitor animals and make sure that pain in any way is alleviated if not eliminated. Furthermore, caging and feeding of these animals are properly monitored and carefully ensured (â€Å"Animal Research FAQ†). Moreover, those who conduct animal research have been issued licenses, and only those with a license would be able to properly monitor the safety of these animals and would be able to alleviate the pain that they are supposed to suffer (â€Å"Understanding Animal Procedures†). Nevertheless, those who fight for animal rights are actually relentless especially when it comes to the use of marmosets for the development of the cure for Parkinson’s disease (McKie). What animal rights advocates are protesting is the deliberate injection of Parkinson’s disease into these marmosets. However, most of these animal rights advocates basically are uninformed regarding the procedures and potential benefits of such experiments, and that they do not realize that the pain experienced by these marmosets is monitored and alleviated by medical experts. Besides, the benefits of finding a cure for Parkinson’ disease are far greater considering that hundreds of thousands of people in the United Kingdom and an even larger figure in the United States can be spared from suffering in case the

Adaptive Culture and Cultural Artifacts Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Adaptive Culture and Cultural Artifacts - Essay Example While the organization needed to know every accurate detail about its stakeholders, the latter also needed to provide an honest and realistic output of needs or wants that are to be fulfilled. In other words, information is the framework of those mentioned requisites; its timing and accuracy significantly determine the capability of the organization to process and integrate it with the organizational processes and practices. Moreover, all other aspects that serve to shape an organizational culture has to be taken into consideration -- its level of impact on organizational culture should determine its ability to be incorporated in the whole adaptive culture-framework. While in general, these aspects are conveniently referred to as processes and practices, in specific it includes policies, competencies, reinforced norms, et cetera. A more binding reinforcement for an organization aspiring an adaptive culture is the top management’s commitment. Additionally, the organization†™s people should be tirelessly reminded of the purpose of such adaptive culture. Both commitment and purpose are consistent ‘reinforcers’ of any desired organizational culture, and adaptive culture is no exception. I think that our organization has a relatively strong culture. First, because everybody knows what and who we do for; more than just profit or bonuses, we serve people. Every business unit, whether directly or indirectly involved, recognized its part in the whole value chain. In other words, each of us, from top to the bottom level, could identify ourselves in the organization’s collective mantra. Moreover, this recognition is reinforced through the individual integration of our own task to the company’s core task. Second, our Human Resource Recruitment filters the entrant workers; they make sure that the individual’s goals are well aligned or approximately paralleled with the company’s. Moreover, the HR people look at the

Learning Disabilities of Gifted and Talented Children Research Paper

Learning Disabilities of Gifted and Talented Children - Research Paper Example In 1981, the Johns Hopkins University arranged a tutorial in which experts belonging to both the fields of the giftedness and learning disabilities were called together to consider this issue from various aspects (Brody and Mills, 1997). That was the time when the educationalists expressed interest in addressing the concerns of the gifted children as well as others with the learning disabilities, but the students with both the traits had not received sufficient recognition. The participants of the tutorial mutually consented upon the existence of the students with both the traits and also the fact that they are overlooked because of the conventional trend of assessing the students either for learning disabilities or for giftedness. The dual exceptionality has been defined as â€Å"emerging within the context of moral concern for the civil right of all children to have an appropriate public school education that will help them fully develop their potential for life satisfaction and c ontribution to society†. Children who are gifted and also have the learning disability can be characterized into three main subgroups. The first kind is of those students who are known for their giftedness but they experience difficulties in the school. These children are perceived to be underachievers. Their underachievement is attributed to their lack of motivation, the subjectivity of self-perception and laziness. For a major part of their educational tenure, their learning disabilities remain unidentified.  ... For a major part of their educational tenure, their learning disabilities remain unidentified. As the level of difficulty of the studies increases, things become so difficult for these students that they fall considerably behind their class fellows and thus, they become prominent as students with learning disabilities. The second kind of these students is that in which the students’ learning disabilities are known but their giftedness is unrealized. So this kind is the opposite of the first kind. The population of this kind of students with dual exceptionality is larger than that of the first kind. Baum (1985 cited in Brody and Mills, 1997) conducted a research and found this kind of students to be 33 per cent of the total number of students with learning disabilities. The intellectual abilities of these students are underestimated because of their poor performance in the IQ tests or inadequate assessment of the teachers. These students are not fortunate enough to be referred for the gifted services because their giftedness is never realized. The third kind of students with dual exceptionality is the largest in population. These are the students whose abilities and disabilities cover each other. The students of this kind are educated in the general classrooms and are deemed unsuitable for the services prescribed to the students with learning disabilities or giftedness. These students are thought to possess average abilities. Despite the fact that the magnitude of performance of these students is considerably lower than it can potentially be, they perform good enough to pass and are hence promoted. However, as the level of difficulty of the education increases, these students start to

Multiple criteria decision analysis Math Problem

Multiple criteria decision analysis - Math Problem Example In connection to this he decided to visit the top three largest banks. He began with imperial bank, Imperial bank was offering the mortgage at 15% interest. However, the owner of the facility has to contribute 10 % of the amount he is requesting. However, the interest rate is not constant, it will be changing in accordance with the rates of the Central Bank. Barclays Bank was offering an interest rate of 10 %, this rate was constant, however, the owner of the facility has to contribute 10 % of the facility and then the bank will take the responsibility of purchasing the building materials for the owner. The final bank was, Finlay Bank, was offering 12 % interest rate loan, however in case the of permanent disability or death then the borrowed amount will be waivered. Bernard has a difficulty in deciding which bank to take the mortgage with, therefore he has decided to use multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to solve the problem. In connection to this he has listed the most important factors to consider: - 1) interest rate 2) Flexibility in payments 3) duration 4) Guarantees. CMDA is an important analytical tool that can be used to solve problems especially when someone is in a dilemma (Marie 2010, pg. 14). The tool has all the important qualities of a decisive tool. It is basically used to (Adams 2009, pg. 26); Data collection; He went to the internet and found out that the most important factors to consider when taking a mortgage are: Legal costs, Valuation, mortgage arrangement fees, mortgage rates, portability, and mortgage related insurance (Jones 2006, pg. 47). Now that the problem has been identified as interest rate, valuation fees, mortgage arrangement fees, and insurance fees. In this connection, the next step is Bernard to understand the relationship between these factors. From the diagram we see that the only bank that is offering alternatives to mortgage is Imperial bank. The alternatives that the

Benefits of Electric Vehicles Essay Example for Free

Benefits of Electric Vehicles Essay 1: Problem Statement The market for plug in vehicles is growing more competitive since variety of manufacturers are increasingly offering plug in hybrid and battery electrical vehicle. However, the initially adopted two key drivers, lower operating cost and zero emission driving, are not proving to be as effective as expected. The market for Electrical Vehicle is still struggling to expand towards more mass-market. The purpose of this research is to acquire knowledge and get a better understanding of the cost- benefit of plug in electrical vehicles as well as its’ impact on environmental and financial policies. Questions!! What are the cost and benefits of Electric Vehicles? What is the environmental impact of electric vehicles? How can environmental and financial policies influence on consumer support? 2: Popular sources [IF USED—THESE DON’T COUNT TOWARD THE FIVE SOURCE REQUIREMENT] Write a brief summary of the key information found from your bridge sources and popular source phase of the research. Source cited Give the key points and issue that have broadened you understanding into the problem you are researching 1. Green vehicle. http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Electric_vehicle An electric vehicle is any motor vehicle that uses one or more electric motors or traction motors as a driving force. There are three main types of electric vehicle exist, those that are directly powered from an external power station, those that are powered by stored electricity originally from an external power source, and those that are powered by an on-board electrical generator, such as an internal combustion engine (a hybrid electric vehicle) or a hydrogen fuel cell. These vehicles are environment friendly as they release almost no air pollutants at the place where they are operated. They also have less noise pollution than an internal combustion engine vehicle. EV gives the greater degree of energy resilience as electricity is a form of energy that remains within the region where it produced. 2. Green Cars and Todays Economy. http://www. consumerenergyreport. com/green-cars-and-todays-economy/ According to this article, plug-in hybrid electrical help the economy and personal expenses can determine which green car to buy. The article specifies the pros and cons of having an electric vehicle. Among the advantages are low insurance cost, low gas cost, job creation and better air quality. The disadvantages include maintenance, initial cost and battery life. 3. Negative Environmental Impacts of Hybrid Vehicles. http://greenliving. lovetoknow. com/Hybrid_Vehicles_Negative_Environmental_Impact This article describes the negative environmental impact Hybrid vehicles. It defines different kinds of hybrids. It questions the source of electrical power for hybrids. According to the article hybrid cars are not emission free. The batteries contain nickel in them and are considered toxic. Two other negative aspects that are covered include the negative impact of high voltage wiring and the initial cost associated with the green Car. 3: Scholarly sources List of sources broken down by discipline: Source cited Research process Qualitative/quantitative Framing or norm/post/critical Key insights/theories/points How does this understanding conflict with any other insight/theory or concur 1. Ecology a) R. Socolow, V. Thomas (2000). The Industrial Ecology of lead and electrical vehicle. Journal of Industrial Ecology. Volume 1, issue 1, Pages 13-36, January 2000 b) Title, author? Journal of Environmental Planning Management; Jan 2009, Vol. 52 Issue 1, P79-96. According to this paper, a common risk analysis of electric vehicles is misguided, because it treats lead batteries and lead additives in gasoline on the same footing and implies that the lead battery should be abandoned. The authors stated that â€Å"The use of lead additives in gasoline is a dissipative use where emissions cannot be confined: The goal of management should be and has been to phase out this use. The use of lead in batteries is a recyclable use, because the lead remains confined during cycles of discharge and recharge. † Clean recycling of the lead batteries should be the goal.. A management system closely approaching clean recycling should be achievable. The lead battery has the potential to become a hazardous product managed in the world. The tools of industrial ecology are helpful in identifying the key criteria that an ideal lead-battery recycling system must meet maximal recovery of batteries after use, minimal export of used batteries to countries where environmental controls are weak, minimal impact on the health of communities near lead-processing facilities, and maximal worker protection from lead exposure in these facilities. This research paper explores quantitatively Californians interest in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) based on a statewide phone survey conducted in July 2004 by the Public Policy Institute of California. The paper develops factors that summarize beliefs about energy and the environment using principal component analysis. This study result concludes that the Californians concerned about the environment, energy efficiency, global warming and recent increases in the price of gasoline state a higher interest in hybrids. Another important reason for considering hybrid electric vehicles, however, is the possibility of using high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes while driving alone, especially for people with potentially long commutes to work. The findings also suggest that beliefs about energy and the environment should be included in vehicle type choice models. First article is emphasizing on the negative impact that electric vehicle has on the environment whereas the latter one highlights on the eco-friendliness and the popularity of the EVs. Source cited Research process Qualitative/quantitative Framing or norm/post/critical. Key insights/theories/points How does this understanding conflict with any other insight/theory or concur 2. Technology. c) Systems for hybrid cars. Otmar Bitsche et. al. Journal of power sources 127 (2004) 8-15. d) The state of the art of electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicles. C. C. Chan. Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol 95, No 4, April 2007. The Otmar article gives us a detailed understanding of what plug-in hybrid electrical are and how their drive trains offer a wide range of benefits such as multifaceted performance improvements, reduced emissions and reduced fuel consumption compared to the internal combustion engine. It demonstrates how important the battery is in different hybrid cars for the right specific automotive application. It describes the cost and safety aspects in terms of battery type and performance of such vehicles. Competition alongside with legislation is pushing hybrid technology towards the future. The paper describes different types of hybrid vehicles and their advantages. It should therefore be considered to have a positive perspective to the reader. However one weakness to the article is that is is relatively technical and may not be appeasing to the general reader in order to understand hybrid cars in a nutshell. Also, the kind of hybrid that would be considered the best in terms of performance is not mentioned. The most significant aspect of the article is it describes all the different modes of hybrid operation and how regenerative braking affects the performance of the battery hence the author develops an important concept. The author approaches the subject matter through a unique method in which he describes stop-start hybrids followed by mild hybrids and full hybrids before focusing on purely electrical cars. The author argues while safety comes first, it is the cost that determines the most important factor to buying a hybrid. In contrast, the Chan paper describes the different state of the art hybrid vehicles in particular. These include Toyota Prius, Honda Civic, Ford Escape, Saturn vue, ISE transient buses and Honda FCX. Chan describes a detailed history of Evs, HEVs and FCVs which the Otmar paper tends to lack. The article describes the differences among Electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles and points out the advantages and disadvantages of each. The paper describes how a better understanding of control theory is essential for the future development of these vehicles. This article is useful in order to choose the right green car for ones individual needs. It describes the hybrid system car by car and is therefore very useful for understanding what is available in the auto market and what to expect from each individual model. The paper is more geared towards the general reader and offers a positive perspective. The most significant aspect of the article is that it is focused on individual car model. It is also in agreement with other sources on hybrid vehicles. The author makes a informative comparison in the form of a table where he compare and contrasts battery electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles in terms of propulsion, energy system, energy source and infrastructure, characteristics and major issues. These factors may arise to a debate on which type of green car is superior in overall performance. Source cited Research process Qualitative/quantitative Framing or norm/post/critical Key insights/theories/points. How does this understanding conflict with any other insight/theory or concur Economics. e) Fredrik Carlsson (2003) Costs and Benefits of electric Vehicles. A 2010 perspective. . Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, volume 37, part 1, January 2003, pp. 1-28. f) Consumer support for environmental policies: An application to purchases of plug-in hybrid electrical vehicle. Alex Coad et. al. Ecological Economics 68 (2009), 2078-2086. The Fredrick paper describes a social cost-benefit analysis with respect to the increase in electric vehicle number within the Swedish transport sector by the year 2010. According to the paper electric cars are socially unprofitable in spite of having a lower life cycle cost compared to their gasoline counterparts. This is due to government subsidies on electric cars which outweigh the benefits related to low fuel consumption. Despite the environmental advantages, electric vehicles are not very common and different means of financially supporting them is often subject to debate. The paper uses a cost benefit model to determine consumer welfare or utility and can be looked upon as having a normative perspective. The weakness of the paper is that it assumes too many assumptions which is not always realistic. It is a technical paper and therefore the mathematical section is not suitable for the general public. The most significant aspect of this research is to answer the question as to whether governments should subsidize electric vehicles and the conclusion is negative. In his conclusion the author states that due to too many uncertainties the case for public subsidies becomes uncertain. In contrast, the Alex paper describes how consumer motivation can be used to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies. According to the author intrinsic motivation such as energy labels for cars and extrinsic motivation such as subsidies or fines can be used to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies. The paper analyzes a survey data set of Swiss households. The results of this survey are of particular interest to policy makers who are keen on guiding consumers towards cleaner technology. This paper gives us a better understanding of intrinsic motivation which is the kind of motivation that comes from within ourselves and not from an outside source that rewards money or grades. Extrinsic motivation is guided by some type of external subject or reward. The paper analyzes to what extent consumers are willing to support public policies in order to promote energy efficient cars. The nature of the article is of normative perspective. The weakness of the article is that the survey was conducted on 1500 Swiss households. Nothing about the age or nature of these households are mentioned in the serve. The most significant aspect of the paper is that it gives one a better understanding of different motivation to get a job done. Although both these papers discuss about the economic perspective of plug-in hybrid electrical, they do so in very different way. While the former article is a cost benefit description of electric vehicles by utilizing an economic model, the latter can be considered as an article that describes the motivation that drives consumer support towards the purchase of a green car. 4: Disciplinary Overlapping: In all sources except for the Cost and benefits article it is mentioned that plug-in hybrid electrical are more cost effective than their gasoline counterpart. However, Fredrik Carlsson in his article mentions that electrical vehicles are socially unprofitable in spite of having a lower private life cycle cost and external cost compared to petrol cars. All six articles do however agree that plug-in hybrid electrical are more fuel efficient and environmentally friendlier than gasoline cars. give us a better understanding on what plug-in hybrid electrical are like and how they have evolved with time. mentions the different systems in hybrid vehicles while describes specific models helping us to choose which green car to buy. The cost benefits of buying a green car is discussed in, however, the source is based on many assumptions and the paper itself is very technical. focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that leads to support of environmental policies. The articles in general give us a better understanding of the problem statement. However one aspect that was overlooked by all the sources involves the environmental effect of different kind of battery systems, their waste and disposal. Category /Element Criteria Range: (Na)(No)(A)(M) Purposefulness (20) identifies a clear research problem and explains it; Readings chosen are relevant to the problem as defined (10-12),(13-15), (16-18),(19-20) 15 Grounding (40) identifies and adequately summarizes the constituent elements of each source: insights, theories or concepts, methodologies, sources of evidence; connects each source to a part of the problem that it helps illuminate (10-12),(13-15), (16-18),(19-20) 0 The selection of sources gives appropriate â€Å"coverage† of the problem (10-12),(13-15), (16-18),(19-20) 17 Critical Awareness (20). Student recognizes and explains how the different elements of each source affect the findings—methods, theories, concepts, assumptions; Student identifies meaningful conflicts or commonalities among different sources (10-12),(13-15), (16-18),(19-20) 17 Integration (20) Student makes intelligent comparisons between insights, theories, methods or data across disciplinary lines to support an improved understanding or cognitive advancement; explains how different ideas could be applied to an improved understanding (10-12),(13-15), (16-18),(19-20) 16 Total: 65.

Petrogenesis of the Basalts From Lanjiafan Formation

Petrogenesis of the Basalts From Lanjiafan Formation Chapter 5: Petrogenesis of the basalts from Lanjiafan Formation and Evaluation of Tectonic setting Most trends on variation diagrams are the result of mixing. Below consider some of the more important mixing process. 5.1 Alteration It is observed from the field evidence as well as petrography that the studied basalts are experienced varying degrees of alteration, which were observed by the presence of the secondary minerals such as calcite and a larger LOI varying from 3.87wt%-13wt%. Elements which are mobile during alteration include SiO2, CaO, Na2O, K2O, indicating that these major elements easily migrate with alteration occurs and low strength elements (Humphris et al., 1978). However, the high field strength elements (HFSE, such as Nb, Ta, Zr, Hf, Th, U, and Y) and the rare earth elements (REE) are relatively immobile in all even the most severe hydrothermal alteration (Pearce, 1975). In contrast, large LILE (LILEs, such as Cs, Rb, Sr, Rb, Pb and Ba) show no linear relation with zirconium. For this reason only high field strength elements Ti, Zr, Y, Nb, Ta, Hf, Th and REE have been used in the discussion of the source properties and petrogenesis of these mafic volcanic rocks. 5.2 Fractional crystallization Fractional crystallization is a major process in the evolution of many igneous rocks, and is frequently the cause of trends seen on variation diagrams for igneous rocks, especially basalts rocks. However, the basalts from the Lanjiafan Formation have Mg# varying from 46.2 to 89.3, slightly higher than those of the primitive mantle derived magmas (about 70-72; Irving and Green 1976; Frey et al., 1987). Besides, they are relatively low in Cr (0.68-37.8) and Ni (14-123), indicating a fractional crystallization to a certain degree in the magmatic chambers or during the ascending processes of the parental magma most likely of plagioclase (Xu et al., (2015). Accordingly, the petro graphical observations show the presence of plagioclase as the dominant mineral. For the alkaline basalts, the weak Eu and Sr anomalies imply a minor fraction crystallization of plagioclase, (Frey et al., 1978). For sub alkaline basalts, the negative Eu (0.58Niu et al, 2009, suggest fractionation crystallization. Therefore, in both alkaline and sub alkaline rocks experienced fractional crystallization. 5.3 Crustal contamination Generally, the compositional variation of magma is subject to different degrees of contamination by different crustal components during their ascent to the surface through continental crust, which changes the composition of magma (Manikyamba et al., 2014). Although it is difficult to assess crustal contamination without having isotope data, some critical geochemical characters may help to identify possible involvement of crustal material during emplacement of alkaline magmas. The basalts samples show a depletion in Nb, Ti, and Ta and a positive Pb anomaly, and some samples show an enrichment of LREE, indicating these samples may have been subjected to crustal contamination (Hawkesworth., 1984) or derived from the enriched lithospheric mantle (Wang et al., 2008). Nb-Ta and neighboring elements (Th, U and La) are not fractionated from each other during partial melting or fractional crystallization (Hofman., 1988), but the enrichment of the mantle source and the crustal contamination can significantly increase LILLE and LREE content and decrease HFSE/LILLE or HFSE/LREE ratios. For alkaline basalts, the higher Nb/Th (11.43-12.84), Nb/U (12.41-54.58) and Nb/La (1.28-1.89) ratios than those of the primitive mantle (Nb/Th=8.4; Nb/U=34; Nb/La=1.04; Sun and McDonough, 1989) values reflect the primary signature of the mantle sources with a significant involvement of crustal contamination in the alkaline basalts (fig 5.3.1). Thus, the alkaline basalts from Lanjiafan Formation were likely derived from a relatively less depleted mantle, and the alkali basaltic magmas were assimilated with minor crustal components. However, sub alkaline basalts show crust-like characteristics with obvious enrichment in Th, U, LREE and depletion in Nb, Ta (La/Nb>1), they have Nb/Th Although, sample D26-11 exhibit no visible HFSE depletion (La/Nb2.5ppm) and Th-U positive anomaly indicate contamination with upper crustal materials (fig 4.6 and 5.3.1). We consider that the primary magma must have experienced significant crustal contamination. Indeed, Fig 5.3.1 shows a general trend toward more crustal contribution from alkaline basalts. Trace-element ratio-ratio plots (fig 5.3.2) for these basalts show a good hyperbolic correlations between Lu/Hf and Hf/Yb, Lu/Hf and Zr/Yb, also indicating crustal contamination in the form of a binary mixing (Wang et al., 2008). 5.4 Nature of the mantle sources The basaltic magmas mainly originated in the continental lithospheric mantle or asthenospheric mantle. Turner et al (1995) presented the statistics of the worldwide continental flood basalts, the CaO/Al2O ratios for the basalts from the continental lithospheric mantle are less than 0.7 while those from the asthenospheric mantle are greater than 0.7. The basalts from western USA (Fitton et al., 1988) have La/Nb ratios greater than 1.5 if the basaltic magmas are derived from the lithospheric mantle, whereas those that originated from the asthenospheric mantle have ratios less than 1.5. As for the analyzed samples in this study, except for sample D26-7 and D26-8 with lower LOI, all of samples have CaO/Al2O ratios between 0.13 and 0.53 with a mean of 0.34 and La/Nb ratios from 0.53 to 0.85, indicating an asthenospheric mantle source. In addition, the La/Ta ratios (>30 for the lithospheric mantle) may also be considered as the discriminating index for the basaltic magmas (Deng et al., 2013). The La/Ta ratios for all of the analyzed samples from Lanjiafan Formation vary from 11.89 to 25.22, with an average of 15.44, indicating an asthenospheric mantle source as well. Although, differences in the degree of melting of mantle peridotite can lead to variation of TiO2 content in basal. Ewart et al., (1998) showed the basaltic magma from the asthenosphere has a relatively high Ti content (mean value of TiO2 in OIB’s is 2.86), while Ti content of basaltic magma from the lithosphere mantle is relatively low. High TiO2 content in alkali basalts rocks (2.46%-3.66%), mainl y comes from the asthenosphere mantle, except for D26-10 sample. For the tholeiitic samples TiO2 (0.44%-0.56%) content is low. 5.5. Evaluation of Tectonic setting Basaltic magmas are known to be emplaced in a variety of tectonic settings including intraplate continental or oceanic environments, intraplate rift zone settings, fast and slow spreading mid-oceanic ridges, island arcs, and back-arc basins (Pearce et al., 1973; Manikyamba et al., 2014). It is further demonstrated that, the Dabieshan orogenic belt has a complex evolution history, and different tectonic settings occurred in its southern and northern slopes in the Early Paleozoic (Ma et al., 2005). The enrichment in HFSE and LREE of the alkaline basalts may be directly derived from the asthenospheric mantle such as ocean island basalts (OIB) like source or the small degree partial melting of a normal-type MORB. On the other hand, contents of the basalts from Lanjiafan Formation suggest that the basaltic protoliths might have been derived from an enriched mantle source. The positive Eu anomaly points to the early plagioclase phenocryst accumulation in the magma chamber, may suggest that they originated from the plagioclase-bearing mantle reservoir and experienced the low degree of partial melting (Frey et al., 1987). As a result, the primary magma of the alkaline suite is possibly generated from the partial melting of the asthenospheric mantle caused by a mantle plume. However, the high contents of HFSE (e.g. Nb, Ti and Ta) relatively high Ti/Y (mostly >350), except for four samples (D26-7, D26-8, D26-10 and D26-11) and low Hf/Ta (mostly Even, the ratios of Zr/Y (10.00-12.47ppm) and Zr/Sm (29.20-34.38ppm) are similar to many intra-plate basalts (Zr/Y>3.5 and Zr/Sm So the alkali basalts from Lanjiafan Formation exhibit some characteristics of the within-plate basalts, they may have been derived from ocean floor, ocean plateau or mature back-arc basin basalts, because they have significant positive Nb anomalies (Floyd, 1989) (fig 4.6a). Most of oceanic island are generally considered to be related ascending plumes of hot mantle (Wilson, 1989). In conclusion the basalts from Lanjiafan Formation are likely formed in an extension-related within-plate environment probably induced by a mantle plume, rather than the supra-subduction zone. Chapter 6: Conclusion and Suggestions 6.1. Conclusion In summary, the Lanjiafan Formation is widely dominated by basaltic rocks, which are mostly alkaline rocks. These basalts contain basanite, trachyte, and rhyodacite. Through advanced Zircon dating method, we first obtained the ages of the of set of these basalts in the southwest Suizhou tectonic zone 459.5-464.4 Ma, which belong to the middle Ordovician, suggesting that a tectono-magma event affected the study area during Paleozoic, which might be the response to occurred of alkaline basalts in the Lanjiafan Formation. The CL images of zircon show that the zircons from the basaltic rocks are off magmatic type and most of them are euhedral. The basalts contain plagioclase phenocryst altered, magnetite, and calcite and pyroxene minerals. Geochemically, the analyzed basalts, which have a large variation of LOI, indicate that the basalts rocks from Lanjiafan Formation experienced of the strong alteration. These alkaline basalts present a weak Eu and Sr anomalies imply minor fraction crystallization of plagioclase, and suggesting that they undergone significant crustal contamination. Thus, the basalts from Lanjiafan Formation were likely derived from a relatively less depleted mantle, and the alkaline basaltic magmas were assimilated with minor crustal components. For sub alkaline basalts, the high Th content (>2.5ppm) and Th-U positive anomaly indicate contamination with upper crustal materials. The basalts from Lanjiafan Formation may be formed in an extension-related within-plate environment probably induced by a mantle plume. Being part of the South Qinling-South Dabieshan Paleozoic alkaline rock belt, the basalts from Lanjiafan Formation result from the Paleozoic extension-initial rifting in the northern margin of the Yangtze Craton.

My Service Learning Experiences Essay -- Personal Reflection

What connections do you make between your service-learning experiences and some of the themes addressed in class (justice, love, rights, responsibility, relationships, etc.)? There were several connections made between my service learning experiences and themes addressed in class. Some of the connections were about human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity and equity. My service learning took place in a nursing home and the applicability of human dignity became abundantly clear. Teachings of solidarity and equity were directly exemplified. Social ties hold people together and are able to support the people who don’t have the power to help themselves. Subsidiarity is also a relevant issue; decisions for helping the elderly is best when done on the lowest level—the people who directly work with the elderly and know what troubles faces them. What impact do you think your service has had? My job was mainly assisting activity coordinators. As an extra set of hands, intermediate tasks were taken care of much quicker. The impact it had was chiefly that the residents were able to enjoy the activities and had to spend less time waiting for assistance. Many residents seemed generally appreciative simply by having a new face helping them out. What was the most unsettling experience you had while serving? Interacting with people who are unable to manage the activities of daily living in their own home hadn’t been an everyday experience for me. Understanding their needs could be adequately done in a classroom, but actually experiencing firsthand their situation gives a much more explicit and real understanding. The aspect of my experience that I found most unsettling was the meagerness of understanding when learning i... ...r enforce those teaching in class. Class lessons are very good in giving you a lot of information and putting it into context. Experiencing and trying to apply those teachings in real life is what really makes it stick. The combination of class and service learning provided a solid foundation on which to be a morally responsible leader. During class, all sorts of ideas are brought up and discussed as a group and critically analyzing from different perspectives and relating it to other ideas. This enables the students rectify their own beliefs and morals in constructive ways. From these developments, we begin to see how it fits in the world and try to apply ourselves and gain wisdom. Gaining knowledge, experience and wisdom, it becomes our understanding to find good in any aspect of our lives and work towards advancing that good in a way that benefits all.

Raves :: essays research papers

Raves Imagine you are in your room and it’s about 1:00 in the morning. It’s pitch black outside and you’ve been lost for hours. There’s nothing good on the radio. You’re dying of thirst and you’re drenched with sweat. You’re just about to turn around and open your window for some fresh air and you hear it. The bass is in sync with your heartbeat and the lights are flashing everywhere. So you follow this music and you arrive at your destination: A rave. It is the vibe that is so commonly talked about within this culture. The dictionary defines "Rave" as: to utter in madness or frenzy; to say wildly; to rave nonsense, which makes you wonder why raves were ever called raves to begin with. Raves consist of about 300-6,000 kids aged to about 17-25. A big empty wear house, lights, a fog machine and a DJ. Every single rave has 1 type of music: techno with a lot of base. It's electronically created with a very fast-pace. Techno music has its origins in gay dance clubs. Hip-hop also has had a big impact on techno music. Rave dancing ranges from being highly choreographed and stylistic all the way to thrusting your body back and forth. Ravers say they lose themselves to the beat and become one with the music by letting the music control their movements. Someone once said: Techno was made not only to be played, but to be listened to loud†¦we are called not to listen, but to feel. How do you know when the rave is and where? Well flyers are put up. A flyer isn’t going to straight out say â€Å"RAVE!† you have to look for the secret messages only Ravers know. They do this to avoid the mainstream. A rave poster can be spotted by noticing that within the words that are on the poster, every E, X, and K, are capitalized. There are certain colors that the flyers will have on them. A lot of times there will be a cartoon character on it, or smiley faces and aliens. Now, I could do a whole paper on fashion. There are four classes of people grouped by what they wear not how much money you have or what kind of car you drive. The most common class is the â€Å"Candy Ravers† they are always female and have short hair that’s usually in barrettes or pigtails.

History of the Trumpet Essay

Trumpets are one of the oldest instruments. In ancient times, people used animal horns or shells like a trumpet. It was first used for signaling in ancient China (2000 BC), Egypt (1500 BC), and Scandinavia (1000 BC). It was long and had no valves. In Roman times, the trumpet was played at military and civilian ceremonies. The first musical use of the trumpet was in the late 1300’s where it had acquired the folded shape similar to today’s. In the 1500’s, Nuremberg, Germany became the center of trumpet making. During that time, the first music for trumpets was written. In the late 1700’s, the trumpet became a regular member of the orchestra. Short pieces of tubing called ‘crooks’ were invented and used to lengthen or shorten the trumpet so it could play more notes. In the 17th to 18th century, trumpets were mostly in the key of D of C for courtly purposes and E flat or F in the military. The valve trumpet was invented in 1815, making crooks unnecessary. Today, trumpets are usually played in orchestras, jazz bands, brass ensembles, popular music and bands. Different sized trumpets have different pitches and are used in different musical groups. Most trumpets in bands are in the key of B flat major. Historically, trumpets were used for many different things but music was not thought of until the late 1300’s. Louis Armstrong , born in 1901 and died in 1971, was a trumpet player. He was one of the most famous and influential trumpet player in Jazz history. Many people thought he was the greatest jazz cornet and trumpet player in the world. He was born in New Orleans and he learned to play the trumpet while serving a sentence for delinquency in the Home for Coloured Waifs. Dizzy Gillespie, born in 1917 and died in 1993, was also a trumpet player. He was an American trumpet player, composer, and band leader. Dizzy Gillespie’s real name is John Birks Gillespie. He was born in Cheraw, South Carolina. Dizzy co founded the bebop jazz movement with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. I have chosen a recording to listen to, from a CD called Trumpets in Modern Jazz. It is called ‘Kush’ and the performer is Dizzy Gillespie. I chose this recording because I knew Dizzy Gillespie was famous and I wanted to hear how he played the trumpet and to see if he really is as good as everyone says. Trumpets may be loud and annoying sometimes but they have survived through the years so treat trumpets with respect and it might let out the best music in the world.

Baring Bank Case Essay

The Fall of sanngs sank The story of Barings Bank shows how overconfidence, coupled with poor internal control, can even bring down an historic financial institution. Below we provide a few teaching points. Nick Leeson seemed to have all the characteristics of an overconfident trader. As described in the chapter, excessive trading, lack of diversification, and too much risk were obviously present. Self-attribution bias seemed to play a major role. One commentator notes that Leeson â€Å"got overconfident after initial trades were successful and] when he started to lose money, got way too aggressive trying to make it up. When Leeson was asked about his actions, he explained that â€Å"l was determined to win back the losses [†¦ ] I was well down, but increasingly sure that my doubling up and doubling up would pay off†¦ â€Å", thereby overestimating his abilities by thinking he could outperform the market even after severe losses. A case study into the affair concluded th at it was overconfidence that led Nick Leeson to bet his reputation. But, as Saul Hansell of The New York Times stated, â€Å"It isn’t Just rogue traders loose annons stretching internal rules on trading desks who have destroyed their investors’ wealth. Money managers who play by the rules can get caught up short, too, when they fall to overconfidence about their mastery of the markets. † He further wrote that, â€Å"It is no secret that traders, as a class, are a young, independent and cocky bunch. The sheer size of the money they are Juggling can lead toa master-of-the- universe attitude. The Fall of Barings sank Barings Bank was founded in 1762 as the â€Å"John and Francis Baring Company’ by Sir Francis Baring. This bank was the oldest merchant bank in London, financed the Napoleonic Wars, and was the Queen of England’s own bank. In 1996, one man, Nick Leeson, managed to bring down Barings Bank, one of the oldest and most conservative financial institutions in the world, through his illicit trading activity. In 1989, Leeson Joined Barings Bank. After being transferred to Jakarta, Indonesia to sort through a back-office mess involving EIOO million of share certificates, Leeson solidified his reputation within Barings when he successfully rectified the situation in 0 months. Lesson also knew how to account for derivatives, even if he did not fully understand the complexities of their pricing. Therefore, in 1992, when Barings opened a new office in Singapore to trade on the expanding Singapore Mercantile Exchange (SIMEX), Leeson became an obvious candidate to manage it. Senior management at Barings Bank assumed that Leeson would turn the Singapore office into a highly profitable endeavor and therefore gave him extensive responsibility. As eliminated the necessary checks and balances usually found within trading rganizations. Soon he was Barings Banks star Singapore trader, bringing in substantial profits from trading on the Singapore exchange. By 1993, Leeson had made more than Elo million, about 10% of Barings’s total profit for that year. In 1994, he delivered over half of the E52. 9 million in revenue for his division on his own, making many proclaim him as the â€Å"miracle worker. † In his autobiography Rogue Trader, Leeson said the culture at Barings was simple: â€Å"We were all driven to make profits, profits, and more profits I was the rising star. Aided by his lack of upervision, the 28-year-old Nick Lesson promptly started unauthorized speculation in futures on the Nikkei 225 stock index and Japanese government bonds. SIMEX regulators were aware of Leeson’s cross-trading activities, and his breach of their exchange regulations, but did not act decisively to stop him. Leeson’s large trading volumes were quickly becoming important for the exchange, and being a lightl y regulated market was central to SIMEX’s strategy to woo trade from neighboring Osaka. Using futures contracts, Leeson speculated that the Nikkei would rise.

Can Art Change the Way We View the World

Can Art Change the Way We View the World? Susan Agee Classics in Philosophy of Art – P346 Gregory Steel Fall 2012 For centuries, art has been interwoven throughout the history of mankind. From primitive carvings on cave walls and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, to the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, artistic creations have enthralled the human race. Art may be a window to the creator’s world; it has potential to instill desire in the viewer to do something they have never done, be somewhere they have never been and inspire to fulfill a dream or goal.Additionally, Art may possibly allow the artist to illustrate their own perception of a place or even attempt to deceive the viewer. However, to truly understand how we see the world we must delve a little deeper than the obvious, which is through our senses, particularly sight. In order to comprehend the world around us, we must first realize that thoughts are based on perception foremost and that those ideas then create a subjective model of the world, constructed from experience, memory, logical inference, and our brain's ability to map out its own internal representation of our individual surroundings.Therefore, whether it is through visual art, literature, poems, sculpture, photography or cinema, art may very well be able to change the way we see the world, by changing our perception. The first recognizable art dates from at least 38. 000BC in Europe, Africa, and Australia. They are the products of minds as intellectually capable and sophisticated as our modern ones and they were just like us, despite the fact that their society was slightly more primitive than ours. Works of this early period are not simple, as if created by a child, but in fact they are quite complex pieces depicting animals, humans and symbols.Additionally, drawings similar to maps, as well as carvings, portable art and elaborately decorated animal skulls have been found in caves all over the world. In the book The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams, the author describes these items stating â€Å"many of these pieces bear images of animal, fish, birds and, less commonly, what appear to be human figures as well as complex arrangements of parallel lines, chevrons and notches. These objects d’art as people tend to think of them, were made from bone, mammoth ivory, amber and antler† (Lewis-Williams 2004).Were these ancient artists creating images to simply communicate with others or were they expressing their emotions in the only way they knew how? Although there is no way to tell for certain the artists’ intentions, it is evident that this â€Å"art† played a role in prehistoric society. Still, art has not always had the same meaning as it does today. In fact, in the time of the philosophers Plato, Socrates and Aristotle the idea of art was related to the Latin word ars, which means craft or specialized form.These individuals based their views of art on the notion that the artist must be trained for his craft and each had differing, yet very similar ideas about art and its place in society. For instance, Socrates believed that paintings and poems â€Å"stand triply removed from the real; that is, there are two realms of existence more real than art objects, the Forms themselves and the things of daily life. The basis for this view is the assumption that the goal of art is the imitation of mundane reality† (Wartenberg, 13). Our brain has developed a way of viewing the world over millions of years of evolution that enables us to succeed and survive.Natural selection has tuned our brains so that we may navigate, manipulate, and meaningfully differentiate our environment and the objects contained in it. So what we see in our minds is a functional model of the physical world, which closely approximates it but is not identical to it; certainly not in the way we are in the habit of assuming. But still this traditio nal skepticism about perceptual experience has often created questions as to whether we can know that things are as we experience them as being, or if the visual world is a grand illusion.To illustrate this idea that perceptual experience may be different than what is real, consider the optical illusion. Artists such as Charles Allan Gilbert and M. C. Escher were masters of the craft of illusion in art. For example, in 1892 Charles Allan Gilbert drew a picture that he called â€Å"All is Vanity†. This piece of artwork is an ambiguous optical illusion using a skull, which has been the object of many pieces of this type, where we see more than one thing in the picture. If we view the overall image, we see a human skull. When we focus on the details of the picture, we see a woman ooking in her vanity mirror. If we look at a close-up, cropped image of â€Å"All is Vanity†, we don't see the skull we just see details of a woman sitting at her dressing table. However, if we e xpand our view, even without seeing the entire image, once we know we're going to see a skull, we can't help but see it. Also, when we look at the picture from a distance, because of all the black surrounding it, once the details of the woman get distorted we still only see a skull. Additionally, M. C. Escher used his expertise in mathematics to create his optical illusions in art.He was fascinated with tessellations, which are arrangements of closed shapes that completely cover the plane without overlapping and without leaving gaps. Typically, the shapes making up a tessellation are polygons or similar regular shapes, such as the square tiles often used on floors. Escher, however, was fascinated by every kind of tessellation – regular and irregular – and took special delight in what he called â€Å"metamorphoses,† in which the shapes changed and interacted with each other, and sometimes even broke free of the plane itself.The regular solids, known as polyhedra, held a special fascination for Escher. He made them the subject of many of his works and included them as secondary elements in a great many more. In the woodcut â€Å"Four Regular Solids† Escher has intersected all but one of the Platonic solids in such a way that their symmetries are aligned, and he has made them translucent so that each is discernible through the others. Additionally, among the most important of Escher's works from a mathematical point of view are those dealing with the nature of space. In the book â€Å"The Magic of M.C. Escher† J. I. Locher states â€Å" this unique interplay between insight and limitation, between possible and impossible worlds has given Escher’s body of work a wholly personal presence in the panorama of visual arts† (J. I. Locher 2000). His woodcut â€Å"Circle Limit III† is a good place to review these works, for it exemplifies the artist's concern with the dimensionality of space, and with the mind's abil ity to discern three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional representation and Escher often exploited this latter feature to achieve astonishing visual effects.To get a sense of what this space is like, one can imagine that he or she is actually in the picture itself. Walking from the center of the picture towards its edge, he/she would shrink just as the fishes in the picture do, so that to actually reach the edge one would have to walk a distance that, to the individual, seems infinite. Indeed, being inside this hyperbolic space, it would not be immediately obvious that anything was unusual about it – after all, one has to walk an infinite distance to get to the edge of ordinary Euclidean space too.However, if one is observant enough, he/she might begin to notice some odd things, such as that all similar triangles were the same size, and that no straight-sided figure we could draw would have four right angles; that is, this space doesn't have any squares or rectangles. In addi tion to ambiguous and mathematical illusions, there is a process known as anamorphosis. There are two types of anamorphosis: perspective or oblique and Mirror, or catoptric. It requires the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to recreate the image.While some of these works of art are more advanced than others, one thing remains constant; the perception of depth in a two-dimensional illustration. With mirror anamorphosis, a conical or cylindrical mirror is placed on the drawing or painting to transform a flat distorted image into a three dimensional picture that can be viewed from many angles. The deformed image is painted on a plane surface surrounding the mirror. By looking uniquely into the mirror, the image appears as it should in natural form.Just as Escher and Gilbert were masters in creating works of illusion with their drawings, so too are the artists that give life to their renditions of this type. Salvador Dali was among many other artists of hi s time to have been intrigued with this form of art and utilized this technique in many of his paintings. Modern day artists of this sort use sidewalks, underpasses, buildings and pavement as their canvases. This type of art is referred to as â€Å"3D art† and it has been seen everywhere from London to New York.

Elisa Allen: A Mystified Identity Essay

John Steinbeck’s short story â€Å"The Chrysanthemums† is centered on the protagonist named Elisa Allen. The vivid portrayal of her character in different parts of the story makes the reader wonder who she really is. Steinbeck started by portraying her as a strong and knowledgeable gardener, with a sense of masculinity, following which she is portrayed as someone who yearns for sexual attention in her sensual encounter with the tinker, and concluded with her being described as a beautiful, feminine lady, and then back to her masculine self all within a span of a few hours. The evolution in the expressions, emotions, and the portrayal of Elisa Allen is an important element of Steinbeck’s â€Å"The Chyrsanthemums. † Firstly, Elisa Allen is described and presented in a very masculine manner. The words â€Å"strong†, â€Å"a man’s black hat† and â€Å"heavy leather gloves† showcase the masculinity. Additionally, her features described as, â€Å"her face was eager and mature and handsome†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦over-powerful. † lend substance to her masculinity. Interestingly, this description of Elisa is in stark contrast to the societal perception of females in that era who are meant to be more feminine. The fact that she is she is thirty five years old and has no children also de-emphasizes her femininity. However, this presentation of masculinity augurs well with her acuity for business which is demonstrated in her interest in knowing more about the conversation of her husband, Henry Allen with the men in business suits. Also, her negotiation skills with the tinker showcase the business acuity of Elisa that has gone unnoticed by Henry. The societal norms have dictated that she carry out her role as a gardener with penchant. As a result, Elisa devotes all of her energy to maintaining her house and garden. Although she rightly brags about her green thumb, Elisa’s connection to nature seems rather coerced and not something that comes as naturally as she claims. She knows a great deal about plants, most likely because as a woman, gardening is the only thing she has to think about. This constant tussle between her femininity and her masculinity lend an interesting insight into Elisa’s character. Next, Elisa is been demonstrated as a woman who lives an unsatisfying, under stimulated and frustrated life who looks to the tinker for a stimulating conversation and even sex. Her physical attraction to the tinker and her flirtatious, witty conversation with him bring out the poet in Elisa. The phrases, â€Å"she shakes out her dark pretty hair and with her eyes shining, she admits the stranger into her yard. She strips off her protective gloves†, â€Å"she looks deep into his eyes, searchingly† and â€Å"She was kneeling on the ground looking up at him. Her breast swelled passionately. † describe the sensual encounter of Elisa with the tinker. During this encounter, there is also evidence of how unsatisfied Elisa is with her life when she says the following, â€Å"I’ve never lived as you do, but I know what you mean. When the night is dark—why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there’s quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It’s like that. Hot and sharp and—lovely. † This statement also showcases the poet in Elisa. Besides the poetic conversation, it symbolizes the level of incompleteness in her life. It seemed that she got carried away in the heat of the moment, and realized at a later point and felt ashamed of what she did and had been saying. After the sensual encounter with the tinker, the femininity is showcased of Elisa is showcased at its fullest by the narrator. Firstly, when she tries to dress up and present herself as a beautiful lady. This is seen in the following narration of the scenario, â€Å"After a while she began to dress, slowly. She put on her newest underclothing and her nicest stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her hair, penciled her eyebrows and rouged her lips. † Following the dressing up, and showing up in front of Henry, the conversation that the couple have is nothing less than hilarious. Evidently, Henry is not used to seeing Elisa dress up and presents her in the feminine manner that she did. The banter that takes place between Henry and Elisa, especially when describing her as â€Å"strong and happy† and â€Å"You look strong enough to break a calf over your knee, happy enough to eat it like a watermelon† was amusing. This conversation clearly showed that Henry did not know how to react to Elisa’s femininity, supporting the fact that Elisa could have been unsatisfied with her current relationship with Henry, and hence seeking an escape in her encounter with the tinker who seemed to be more receptive and appreciative to her. However, the conversation that took place while in the caravan negated the short burst of feminism in Elisa and was overpowered with a sense of masculinity by the topics of their conversation which included: â€Å"wine over dinner,† and â€Å"women going to fights. † This could be because of the realization that nothing has changed. She is still the same lady who was gardening a few hours ago. The tinker, despite showing interest and stimulating her, was only concerned in his profit, and was manipulative to say the least. Interestingly, in the final sentence of the story, the narrator describes Elisa as a â€Å"weak, old woman. † In conclusion, the narration has been so vivid that the reader could see the emotions and the constant tussle that Elisa faces as a woman and a wife. Her life as a woman has been confined to her duties as a gardener, with no affection and love been shown by her husband Henry. This incompleteness in her life leads her to seek solace in her encounter with the tinker where she sees a ray of hope to experience her feminine self. However, this feel-good experience is short-lived when she says her chrysanthemums that she gifted to the tinker lying on the road. This shattered her dreams of being a free woman, and brings her back to reality. The reality of course is that she is confined to her reserved, unfulfilling, monotonous life as a wife with no children. The pace at which she experienced the highs and lows of her life, in a span of a few hours is note-worthy and adds to the literary value of Steinbeck’s â€Å"The Chrysanthemums. †

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth’s romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, â€Å"The Prelude† (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keats’s great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and women’s, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. ————————————————- Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.